Category Archives: Business

Business, Space

Virgin Tales

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Jeff Foust has some reporting on Will Whitehorn’s talk at ISDC yesterday. In this post, he notes that White Knight 2 will roll out on July 28th, presumably in Mojave, and discusses other potential applications than just a first stage for SpaceShipTwo, including a satellite launcher. The lack of comment other than “we’ve learned some lessons” on the SS2 propulsion is interesting to me. It sounds like they’re still not sure what they’re going to do, which continues to put SS2 schedule (whatever it is) in jeopardy. I suspect that Sir Richard’s hype remains ahead of the actual program.

In this post Whitehorn mildly disses the Lynx:

XCOR is a company I respect, but with respect to them, they’re not building a spaceship. They’re building basically a high-altitude MiG equivalent. They’re building something that you can strap in and go up to 37 miles. You won’t get your astronaut wings but you will see the curvature of the earth. That will be an exciting project, but the problem is that it’s not a space project, and I think it’s been a little bit wrong to call it that.

While technically that’s true, it is a project that can easily evolve into a “space project,” which is what the program intent is. I don’t see this as a problem. In fact, I see it as a solution, because Virgin may have bitten off more than it could chew with SS2. In hindsight (and foresight for some of us) it might have been useful to develop more operational experience with a lower-performance vehicle before moving to a bigger one.

Really, the only thing lacking from the XCOR product is a lack of astronaut wings–it will certainly be a space experience, and a more personal one with a better view, sitting in the left seat. I think that the market for it will be bigger than Whitehorn claims to think.

Business, Economics, Technology and Society

Revenge Of The Jedi

The browser wars return.

This particularly caught my eye:

Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.

The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user’s browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word “football” into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with “football” in the name or description.

Firefox has named this new tool the “awesome bar” and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user.

“Sitting at somebody else’s computer and using their browser is going to become a very awkward experience,” said Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Sounds like a market opportunity to me. I have a few ideas about how to solve it.